Conference Presentation, Panel
Fireside Chat with Mark Moffat, CEO of IFS | RAISE Summit 2026
- IFS aims to orchestrate a technology revolution for non-desk workers, leveraging 40 years of functional depth to address low AI penetration in industrial value chains compared to support functions.
- The company plans to deploy AI capabilities within eight days from initial conversation to contract signature, utilizing probabilistic thinking for performance optimization while maintaining a deterministic approach for health and safety.
- IFS intends to avoid reliance on any single frontier model, instead adopting an agnostic operating strategy that integrates closed, frontier, open-source, and lower-parameter models at the edge to ensure responsibility and sovereignty.
- Significant growth is anticipated in manufacturing value chains, where IFS expects to optimize global economic stages and flip planning for production, materials, logistics, and fulfillment, whereas utilities are predicted to change slowly due to five-to-ten-year funding cycles.
- IFS expects the industry term "AI" to cease existing in five years, replaced by "intelligent software and capabilities," as the role of enterprise software shifts from a system of record.
- The company will focus on power generation and electrification demands by applying frontier-based technology, having already reduced downtime by 38% for a distillery customer through predictive analytics on design, engineering, and telemetry data.
- IFS reports a 96% Gross Retention Rate (GRR) which it aims to maintain by solving problems immediately, while supporting 100% of US commercial aviation flights carrying 800 million passengers annually.
- Future orchestration will involve ecosystems including models and robotics, though the company warns against "vibe coding" for critical maintenance requiring 99.99999% reliability.
- Strategic priorities include spending significant time in the field to identify pinch points and leverage trust to navigate bleeding-edge technology, while avoiding single-threaded strategies.
- The outlook anticipates the emergence of "headless," "agentic," and "different execution layers" in the software landscape, with a continued need for precision and rigorous value tracking in operations.